AMD unveils Opteron A1100 ARM processors

AMD has officially unveiled its first-ever ARM processor family, the Opteron A1100 Series, at the Open Compute Summit - complete with the news that it will contribute a new micro-server design to the project as part of a motherboard specification it calls 'Group Hug.'

Unveiled by Andrew Feldman, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's Server Business Unit, at the Open Compute Project's annual summit late last night, the Opteron A1100 Series features up to eight ARM Cortex-A57 64-bit processing cores manufactured on a 28nm process node, 4MB of shared L2 and 8MB of shared L3 cache, support for up to 128GB of dual-channel DDR3 or DDR4 memory, eight PCI Express 3.0 lanes, eight SATA-III ports, two 10Gb Ethernet ports, and co-processors for cryptography and data compression acceleration.

The new chips will fit into a micro-ATX micro-server motherboard, breaking out all of the various features of the processor and including a bundled copy of a Fedora-based Linux distribution featuring a standard build chain, platform-specific device drivers, and fully-operational ports of the Apache web server, MySQL database engine, PHP scripting language, and Java 7 and 8 - all of which can take advantage of the new 64-bit ARM architecture used in the Cortex-A57 cores.

While AMD was able to show off pre-production developer boards for its ARM server chip, codenamed Seattle, the company has admitted that the parts won't be ready to purchase just yet: sampling is beginning this quarter alongside manufacturing of the development boards, but the company has not yet given a formal launch date for mass availability of the chips.